Case Study: AI Overviews for Local Searches

How can you rank a small business in Google's AIO's?

May 12, 2025

I’m so excited to be releasing this!

Miriam Ellis and I just conducted a case study on the prevalence of AI Overviews (AIO’s) in local searches, and we found some fascinating stuff.

The goal of our study was to find out:

  • How often AI Overviews appear in response to local queries

  • Whether there are noticeable patterns in the types of searches that trigger AIO’s

  • How often AI Overviews and Local Packs overlap in the same results

Here are two interesting findings (of many) 👇️ 

1. AIO’s most often show up for hybrid-intent queries.

There have already been other studies showing that Google tends to display local packs for searches with local intent and AIO’s for searches with informational intent, but, according to our research, AIO’s are most dominant in hybrid-intent queries.

2. Some industries are more impacted by AI Overviews than others.

Regardless of location, there is a notable degree of sameness in the percentage of AI Overviews being returned for each given industry. For example, about 70% of legal queries will receive AI Overviews.

Read the full case study to learn:

  • What the relationship between AIO and local pack prevalence is

  • How we think Google’s AI decides which local businesses to show in the AIO’s

  • How local businesses can increase their chances of ranking in the AI results

P.S. We even made you a checklist to help with that last question — it’s at the end of the article!

Darren